


Kiss Me Now, You'll Catch Your Death

by dear_monday



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-09
Updated: 2012-10-09
Packaged: 2017-11-15 23:26:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/532936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dear_monday/pseuds/dear_monday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A boy who was once called Frank opens his eyes at the kiss of pond water on his cheeks, and an inexplicable grief too big for his fragile body dissipates like the smoky shreds of a dream. His limbs are stiff and clumsy, but it makes no sense to stay where he is.</p>
<p>He stands, slow and tentative like a spindly-legged colt, water plastering his clothes to his skin, and the branches overhead shiver and sway with anticipation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kiss Me Now, You'll Catch Your Death

**Author's Note:**

> **additional warnings for references to suicidal ideation and substance abuse (alcoholism) as well as major character death prior to and during the story.**

April. The nights begin to wane while the days ripen, growing fat and heavy on their delicate branches. Spring brushes soft, warm hands over the earth and things buried deep in the soil begin to stir, clawing their way towards the light.

A boy who was once called Frank opens his eyes at the kiss of pond water on his cheeks, and an inexplicable grief too big for his fragile body dissipates like the smoky shreds of a dream. His limbs are stiff and clumsy, but it makes no sense to stay where he is.

He stands, slow and tentative like a spindly-legged colt, water plastering his clothes to his skin, and the branches overhead shiver and sway with anticipation.

 

*

 

Gerard hates the house before he's even laid eyes on it. It's too big for the three of them, scornful and cold and uninviting. _Your existence makes no difference to me_ , it seems to say. _I was built long before you were conceived and I will be here long after you are dust. Take the razor to your wrists. Or don't. Why should I care?_

It makes Gerard uneasy, so he takes to the sprawling garden as summer begins to blossom. He evades his mother's concern easily and spends hours watching the incandescent fish moving lazily through the dark water of the pond, the leaves unfurling in a riot of fresh green, the sparks of the fireflies celebrating the dusk. Mikey joins him once or twice, but his delicate lungs always drive him back to his bed before long. The garden calls to Gerard in a way no other place ever has, seeping into his dreams and tugging at him as if there are fish hooks lodged under his skin.

 

*

 

There's cheap gin throbbing sluggishly in Gerard's china-blue veins when he first sees the boy. The twilight is heady and sweet-smelling, all streaks of deep violet and Prussian blue shot through with gold, and Gerard can't see straight. The fireflies are leaving bright, jittery trails in their wake, like tiny shooting stars, and their reflections in the still surface of the pond shimmer and shatter into little fragments of brightness. It feels as if the world's seams are straining as whatever is underneath starts to escape.

The boy is sitting in the long grass on the other side of the pond, the reflected light dappling his skin, watching Gerard with dark, fathomless eyes. He looks luminescent, inhuman, more like a painted creature of light and soil than a real boy. Maybe he isn't; maybe Gerard's mind is just playing tricks on him again. Maybe he's a living, breathing boy, or maybe just an insubstantial concoction of dusk and alcohol. Gerard tries to speak, but the words don't come like they normally do when the drink is quickening his tongue. The boy reminds Gerard of a frightened animal, ready to melt back into the shadows at the slightest sign of danger.

And then the boy smiles, one corner of his mouth pulling up, shy and hopeful, and his face is the last thing Gerard sees before his eyes flutter closed and he knows nothing more.

Gerard wakes the next morning with damp grass tickling the back of his neck and leaves tangled in his hair. There's no sign that the boy was ever there at all.

 

*

 

The boy's name is Frank. Sometimes he talks to Gerard, quiet and halting, in a voice like scratched silver. Sometimes he seems content just to _be_ , still and silent as a work of art. A lifetime ago, Gerard's hands would have ached to draw him, capture this beautiful, eldritch boy on paper and pin him to reality like a butterfly spread out beneath a pane of glass. Gerard finds himself tracing the arch of Frank's eyebrows, the curve of his mouth and the rare, bright flash of his teeth, the slope of his nose, the line of the nape of his neck and the notches of his vertebrae. Watercolors, Gerard finds himself thinking. Delicate suggestions of light and shadow, with India ink for the darkness of his eyes.

But those days are gone. It's been a long time since Gerard was in a fit state to create anything at all, let alone do justice to a creature like Frank.

Frank seems as fascinated by Gerard as Gerard is by him. When Gerard is floating through a fog of drink, swinging wildly from laughter at the absurdity of it all to caustic bitterness and back again, Frank sits - not too close, never too close - and listens. He doesn't seem to mind that Gerard is barely making sense. He just watches, wide-eyed, as if _Gerard_ is something extraordinary.

 

*

 

August seethes and broils and scorches, and Frank is all that stands against Gerard losing his mind completely. When Gerard is near-delirious, desperate for a way, _any_ way to leave his body, Frank dips his fingers into the cool, dark water of the pond and presses them to Gerard's clammy forehead. Gerard leans into the touch. Frank is an anchor in a raging storm, and Gerard has never needed anyone more.

Slowly, slowly, Frank's shyness starts to thaw. His smiles grow brighter, less guarded, and Gerard is bewitched. He starts to sit closer to Gerard - just a little closer every time, as if he's waiting for Gerard to push him away, but of course Gerard never does. He doesn't think he could even if he wanted to. The ghostly, jewel-bright fish and newly-hatched tadpoles scatter when Gerard tries to cool his hands in the murky water, but they flock to Frank. Gerard spends hours - _days_ \- watching them nudge their rounded, glassy-eyed heads against Frank's pale fingers.

They seem to like Frank.

During the brief spaces where Gerard is almost lucid, he sometimes manages to catch and hold the thought that Frank seems more like one of them than something human. Gerard's dreams run dark when he sleeps, as they always have, and although the details are tangled and elusive, he often wakes with an uneasy certainty sitting on his chest.  It tells him that Frank is full of bright fish scales and refracted sunlight and strands of emerald pondweed, not the rust-colored filth that sustains living things. He imagines peeling Frank's skin away to uncover the beautiful, pale sweep of his ribs, just clean, unblemished bone curved around the empty space where Frank's viscera should be.

But then Frank is there, watching Gerard as he wakes, an indecipherable, _old_ expression on his young face, and Gerard realizes that it doesn't matter.

 

*

 

Summer storms thicken the air until Gerard can hardly bear to set foot in the house. Mikey and his mother get fainter, duller each time he sees them like tarnished coins passed from hand to hand to hand. After a while, Gerard can no longer clearly picture their worried faces anymore. Frank, meanwhile, is the blazing sun around which Gerard's tiny world revolves.

Time starts to play tricks on Gerard too, joining his imagination in its quest to unravel him completely. Sometimes he loses hours, sometimes whole days; sometimes he lays his head down in the grass and sleeps for weeks, centuries, _aeons_ , only to wake and find the sun exactly where it was when he closed his eyes. Frank sleeps too, sometimes, and Gerard is distantly aware that it isn't right to stare like he does, but he couldn't tear himself away if he tried. Frank's face at rest is almost seraphic, his eyelashes dark against his pale cheeks, a delicate tracery of dusky veins threaded underneath his translucent skin like roots.

Solstice prowls closer and closer each time the sun sinks back into the ground at the end of the day, and Frank seems troubled. The terrible, blinding innocence in him is starting to seep away, bit by bit.

"What's wrong?" Gerard asks quietly, one afternoon when the last of the day's sunlight is dusting everything it touches with fiery, molten gold. The thing that has taken root inside Gerard rebels against the idea of Frank being unhappy. Gerard doesn't know what a mess like himself could possibly offer a creature like Frank, who hardly seems to be of this world at all - but if there's anything, Gerard will do it. His heart is Frank's; has been for-- weeks? Years? Forever? He doesn't know.

It's hard to imagine Frank worrying about anything. He slips easily through the holes in reality like a fish through water, untouchable and incorruptible as a painted saint. A saint kissed by some strange, ageless gods rather than the threadbare echo rotting in churches today, maybe, Gerard thinks, but... pure. Clean.

"Nothing," Frank says in a voice like cool water and pebbles, glancing up at Gerard from under his eyelashes. There are still shreds of his shyness that cling to his delicate bones like spider silk, gorgeous and painfully, desperately fragile. Gerard imagines licking them away and tasting spun sugar with something strange and alien underneath. "There's nothing wrong."

There is. There's something, tangled up in Frank like pondweed in a fishing net, Gerard can feel it. But Frank is all smoke and glassy bones, and Gerard believes with all his heart that the barest hint of pressure could shatter him completely, disperse him into little jagged shards like his reflection in the pond.

So Gerard lets it go.

 

*

 

Solstice dawns hot and ominously still. Gerard's own skin feels too small, and ill-fitting and the world is closing in on him like some monstrous goldfish bowl. He can feel every blade of grass tickling his skin, every stitch of clothing on his body, every hair plastered against his skin by the sweat leaking from his pores, every breath of thick, heavy air pouring sluggishly into his lungs, every hot, slow pulse of dirty blood in his veins.

Frank is uneasy too. Gerard _aches_ to gather Frank into his arms, soothe him and croon meaninglessness into his hair until he stills, exorcise the shrieking violin string tension from his pretty bones. But the warm, blurred haze of gin that Gerard is floating in holds him back. His body doesn't feel like his own, clumsy and inelegant and _wrong_. If he reaches for Frank now, he's going to do more harm than good.

Instead, he licks his dry, cracked lips and says, "Talk to me."

A smile flares across Frank's face, as quick and strange and blinding as a falling star. "I'm not much to talk to. You'd be better off finding someone else."

He's sitting cross-legged in the long grass that circles the pond, looking down almost wistfully at Gerard as he sprawls limply on his back. The sun lends him a blazing halo and lights him up from the inside out like a Halloween lantern. Gerard has never seen anything more beautiful.

"I want _you_ ," he insists, the words strange and not entirely comfortable in his mouth. If Frank keeps talking, he can't disappear. It feels as if the walls between reality and the vast, wild Otherness outside are stretched to breaking point today, and when the first jagged tear appears, Frank will be the first thing to be drawn into it. "Just-- talk to me. Tell me a story or something. Whatever you want."

Frank chuckles (pebbles and wet pennies and the twilight chorus of the frogs, Gerard thinks distractedly). "If it makes you happy." he draws in a deep breath and leans down a little towards Gerard, making himself comfortable. "A long, long time ago--"

"Not once upon a time?"

Something flickers behind Frank's eyes. "Once upon a time is for stories with happy endings. A long, long time ago, there was a boy, and when he was born, his parents celebrated. They'd always wanted a strong, honest son to take care of the house and the family business when they'd been laid to rest."

Frank sounds like he's told this story before. The words hang in the air, tangling together and wrapping spidery tendrils around Gerard's heart.

"But he wasn't the son they'd been praying for," Frank continues, more quietly, so Gerard has to lean closer to make out the words. "He was... strange. Quiet. Just a weak, sickly child who was never interested in toys or games or other children. He wouldn't play with them, just sat and watched as if he didn't understand. He always seemed so sad, no one knew why."

Frank's eyes are too deep and dark for Gerard to read, fixed on the glassy surface of the pond as if he's a spectator like Gerard, bound to look without touching as the story unfolds. The dusk has started to draw in, slow and soft, and Gerard props himself up on his elbows to listen.

"They thought the boy might still change. Lots of children do. Children are strange." A frog croaks in solemn agreement, its eyes glinting blackly in the gathering darkness. Frank's voice has dropped almost to a whisper, and Gerard finds himself sitting up, his heart in his throat. Something terrible is going to happen and there's not a thing he can do to stop it.

"He didn't change. His parents were starting to feel uneasy. They thought he was possessed, but no priest could find anything to drive out of him. They called in the best doctors they could afford, held his nose and made him take a hundred different medicines, but still nothing changed. It was like nothing they could do could even touch him."

Something stirs in the depths of Gerard's mind like disturbed leaf muck and fish bones at the bottom of a pond. He chases it, but with no success.

"They were living in fear of their own son. He seemed so... other, as if he was just a visitor from somewhere else, and that frightened them. God and science had both failed them. They were never superstitious and neither of them wanted to be the first to say it, but they'd both begun to wonder if there was a cuckoo in their nest. Maybe the creature they thought was their son was a Changeling."

"And - was he?"

Frank looks up, as if he's just woken from a trance. "Mm? Oh. I don't know. No one knows. It doesn't matter. It was hot that summer, the kind of heat that makes people lose their minds. All they knew was that they had to do something."

Gerard could swear his heart has stopped. The whole world is holding its breath, waiting, hanging onto Frank's every word.

"And they did," Frank murmurs, looking up and meeting Gerard's eyes. "Late one night, they shared a drink, then went upstairs and woke him. They drowned him in the pond and left town the next morning. No one ever heard from them again."

Gerard feels as if all the breath has been knocked out of him.

"But that wasn't the end," says Frank softly. "Not even close. There was something in that house that wouldn't let him rest. When another family bought the house, he... came back."

"Why?" asks Gerard. He suddenly realizes that his mouth is dry, and that he's leaning in close to Frank.

"It was hungry. It wanted something, and the boy was bait."

"What-- what did it want?"

Frank blinks. His expression is fathomless. He looks so young, so _lost_ , and something in Gerard is slowly splintering. "The beating heart of a first-born son. Of every first-born son to set foot in the house."

And Gerard breaks. He leans closer, closer, until he could count the flecks of color in Frank's eyes, see each one of this eyelashes, the faint scattering of freckles across his nose. Frank doesn't pull back, sweet and tentative, and his eyes flutter closed when Gerard's mouth ghosts chastely over his.

"I... no one's ever done that to me before," Frank says, a little breathlessly, a pretty pink flush blossoming in his cheeks.

"I, uh. Sorry?" Gerard knows he sounds ridiculous but his heart is fluttering in his chest and Frank's eyes are big and bright.

"No!" Frank says quickly. The corner of his mouth twitches up fractionally, uncertainly. "Don't be. I... liked it."

He leans in, resting his forehead against Gerard's, his hair tickling Gerard's skin like pondweed. His smile is small and shy, his eyes wide, and, god, he's so _beautiful_ that Gerard can barely breathe. Frank is all he can see, saturating every one of Gerard's senses. Gerard is drowning and it's the best he's ever felt.

"So, that--" Gerard licks his lips. "That story, where did you hear it? Who told it to you?"

Frank frowns slightly, a small line appearing between his eyebrows. "No one. At least, I don't... I don't remember anyone telling it to me. I just know it."

Things are aligning, falling slowly into place, but from the eye of the storm Gerard can't make sense of the pieces. Frank lifts one hand, slow and tentative, and brushes his thumb gently over Gerard's cheekbone. Gerard's breathing is shallow and ragged, and he shivers at Frank's touch.

"You always look so sad," Gerard says, without thinking. But Frank _does_ look sad, too sad for one so young.

"I'm sorry," Frank whispers. Gerard can see wetness sparkling in his eyelashes. "I'm sorry, Gerard, I'm so sorry."

"Sorry?" Gerard's head is full of dusk and the scent of jasmine and _Frank_ and he can't think, can't make sense of it. Doesn't _want_ to make sense of it. "Frank, what...?"

"I'm sorry," Frank repeats, his voice cracking. "Gerard, I'm not-- I don't _want_ to... give me your hand. It doesn't have to hurt, Gerard, I promise. I'll be with you."

Frank's small, cool hands find their way into Gerard's and he takes them blindly, unquestioningly. A solitary tear streaks down Frank's cheek, leaving a quicksilver trail that's wet against Gerard's jaw when Frank darts in, trembling, and presses his face into Gerard's neck for a long moment. "It's time," he says against Gerard's skin. "Goodbye, Gerard."

And then Frank is tugging at Gerard's hands and the world around him is unraveling, and the water is cool and dark and inviting. The shadows on Frank's face gaze down at Gerard, heart-wrenchingly sad and lovely, the surface countless murky fathoms above them both. Frank doesn't let go of Gerard's hands, and the water begins to fill his lungs.

Frank's eyes are the last thing Gerard sees before the blessed darkness closes gently over him, and he knows nothing more.

 

*

 

A boy who was once called Frank opens his eyes at the kiss of pond water on his cheeks, and an inexplicable grief too big for his fragile body dissipates like the smoky shreds of a dream. His limbs are stiff and clumsy, but it makes no sense to stay where he is.

He stands, slow and tentative like a spindly-legged colt, water plastering his clothes to his skin, and the branches overhead shiver and sway with anticipation.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Kiss Me Now, You'll Catch Your Death](https://archiveofourown.org/works/553135) by [dear_monday](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dear_monday/pseuds/dear_monday), [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins)




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